POLITICS: Romney and Obama Sing From The Same Hymnal on Emergency Room Care

A sure sign of political silly season: seeing a whole lot of Obama supporters reflexively pushing the same attacks on Romney with the same overheated rhetoric at the same time on points that don't stand up to even the most modest logical scrutiny. You'd think, given the clear and obvious points of disagreement between these two tickets on some issues, that would be the focus, but no...

[W]e do provide care for people who don't have insurance ... if someone has a heart attack, they don't sit in their apartment and - and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care.

Romney in 2010:

It doesn't make a lot of sense for us to have millions and millions of people who have no health insurance and yet who can go to the emergency room and get entirely free care for which they have no responsibility

When they show up at the hospital, they get care; they get free care paid for by you and me...If that's not a form of socialism, I don't know what is.

"Socialism" here is typical of Romney trying too hard to pander to his audience; he's never been a good political communicator, and if anything he was even worse in 2007, one reason why he lost in the primaries that year. (I'll set aside the issue, which will be the subject of a much longer post in the works, over how we distinguish socialism from other forms of collectivism). Plainly, though, what he's describing is a form of redistribution, i.e., some people receiving services and others getting the bill.

NPR argues that Romney is wrong because uninsured people do get stuck with large bills for emergency room services, but this completely misses his point, which is that (1) uninsured people do go to emergency rooms for care because they know it has to be given regardless of insurance or ability to pay and (2) hospitals are frequently unable to collect these bills, and end up passing on the costs to other customers and/or taxpayers.

You may agree or disagree with Romney's preferred solutions to this - which, in Massachusetts, were essentially identical to Obamacare. You may even think he's unduly concerned about the wrong problems. But what you can't do is attack him for saying this stuff without mentioning that Obama has been saying the exact same thing for years, and indeed has made it a central theme of his policy and legal arguments for his own health care policies. Here's Obama in June 2012:

First, when uninsured people who can afford coverage get sick, and show up at the emergency room for care, the rest of us end up paying for their care in the form of higher premiums.

And the only people who may have a problem with this law are folks who can afford health care but aren't buying it, wait until they get sick and then going to the emergency room and expecting everybody else to pick up the tab. That's not responsibility. That's not consistent with who we are.

You have a choice to buy -- if you can afford health insurance -- and you can, I assume, Jared. So if you don't buy it, and you can afford it, it is an irresponsible thing to do to ask the rest of America's taxpayers to pay for your care when you go to the emergency room.

Now, I wish we had a Republican candidate who was not burdened by the legacy of Romneycare, as its aftermath in Massachusetts illustrates the folly of the Obamacare solution to the EMTALA "free rider" problem; we have to settle for Romney pledging to repeal a law that does things he evidently still believes in. A more robust debate on the issue would benefit everyone. But it's a sign of the intellectual bankruptcy of Obama's defenders that they can find nothing better to do than beat up on Romney for making the exact same arguments as Obama in defense of the exact same policy solutions to the exact same problems. If it offends you to see this sort of thing said about people who go to emergency rooms to get EMTALA-mandated care they will not end up paying for, I have one simple answer for you: don't vote for President Obama.

Mike Trout recently played his 162nd major league game, in which time he scored 136 runs. How unusual is that? Pretty unusual, at least in modern baseball. Baseball-Reference.com has game logs going back to 1918, and while I can't run a systematic search, I'm pretty sure this is a complete list of the players since 1918 to score 120 or more runs in their first 162 major league games - 8 Hall of Famers out of 26 (plus at least one, Ichiro, who is sure to be a 9th, plus others who still could and a handful of guys who would have made it if they'd stayed healthier or out of World War II). Ages and years are listed by the age the player was in the season when he played his 162nd game:

Player

Runs

Age

Year

Joe DiMaggio

154

22

1937

Ted Williams

146

21

1940

Lloyd Waner

142

22

1928

Johnny Frederick

142

28

1930

Mike Trout

136

20

2012

Vada Pinson

136

20

1959

Barney McCoskey

135

23

1940

Roy Johnson

133

27

1930

Jackie Robinson

132

29

1948

Jim Gilliam

132

25

1954

Dom DiMaggio

131

24

1941

Ichiro Suzuki

130

28

2002

Kiki Cuyler

130

26

1925

Frank Robinson

128

21

1957

Charlie Keller

127

23

1940

Nomar Garciaparra

126

23

1997

Hanley Ramirez

124

23

2007

Bobby Bonds

123

23

1969

Pete Reiser

123

22

1941

Chuck Klein

122

24

1929

Hal Trosky

121

21

1934

Augie Galan

121

23

1935

Carlos Beltran

120

22

1999

Johnny Pesky

120

26

1946

Lou Boudreau

120

22

1940

George Watkins

120

31

1931

As you can see, the list includes a number of guys (Ichiro, Jackie Robinson, Johnny Frederick, Roy Johnson, George Watkins) who arrived in the majors as seasoned veterans in mid-career. (This is not the case for Johnny Pesky, who scored 105 runs in 147 games as a 23 year old rookie, then spent 3 years at war before scoring 115 runs in 1946 when he returned). It's also heavily dominated by the high-scoring 1925-41 period. The number of players who compiled a scoring record like Trout's at such a young age is short and dominated by immortals.

You can go back and find a few more in the 1900-17 period - Federal League star Benny Kauff scored 124 runs in his first 159 games, Roy Thomas 137 runs in his first 150 games, Lefty Davis scored 150 runs in his first 171 games in 1901-02. The 19th century is different, of course - Willie Keeler scored 191 runs in his first 170 games, Billy Hamilton 165 runs in his first 172 games, Hugh Duffy 204 runs in his first 207 games, and going all the way back to the beginning in 1871, in the days before gloves, groundskeeping or even fixed fielding positions, Ross Barnes scored 272 runs in his first 136 National Association games and 197 runs in his first 165 National League games.

But if you have to go back that far, it should tell you what a special player Trout really is.

The Obama campaign has spent months laboring to get this election to be about anything but the president's record and the candidates' policy proposals. As often happens in campaigns, this requires painting caricatures with no connection to the facts. The Obama camp has worked hard to make Mitt Romney out as a bad, unfeeling, cold-hearted rich guy who only cares about his own bottom line. Romney himself hasn't helped the matter by being such a stiff, tin-eared speaker who actually looks and sounds like a walking stereotype; political communication is not among his skills. But the reality is that Romney's biography shows him to be a real-life Good Samaritan who has walked the walk of caring for his fellow man not only with his own money but with his own time and his own hands. I've had my share of political complaints about Romney, but on this score, the critics should be ashamed of themselves: Romney is a genuine role model of what private citizens can do to assist those in need.

Romney and his wife Ann also maintain a separate foundation, established in 1999...The couple have contributed approximately$13.6 million, including an initial gift of more than $3.6 million, to their Tyler Charitable Foundation, based in Boston, MA, in the past 13 years.

Since the Tyler Foundation began making grants in 2000, its annual disbursements have averaged approximately $650,000 per year. The foundation's most active years were 2003 and 2008, with approximately $2 million given away in each. In 2010, the most recent year for which data is available, the foundation hit its average, donating $650,000.

This is admirable in itself. But for wealthy philanthropists, writing checks can be easy. Romney has gone the extra mile, giving of his own time. There are many examples:

One cold December day in the early 1980s, Mitt Romney loaded up his Gran Torino with firewood and brought it to the home of a single mother whose heat had been shut off just days before Christmas.

Years after a business partner died unexpectedly, Romney helped the man's surviving daughter go to medical school with loans for tuition - loans he forgave when she graduated.

And in 1997, when a fellow church member's teenage son fell seriously ill, Romney sprinted to the hospital in the dead of night, where he kept vigil with his terrified parents.

That story begins in the aftermath of the wildfires that engulfed San Diego in the fall of 2007, consuming dozens of homes in Reed Fisher's neighborhood and nearly his own.

Fisher told CBS News the fire did burn a hole through a fence and caught the corner of his house.

While the house was being repaired Fisher got a call from a fellow Mormon, one of his son's friends, offering help. It was Matt Romney, one of Mitt Romney's five sons.

When asked what he said, Fisher said, "We would like to come help. We would like to come do something. And I said, 'Matt, I wish you could, but almost everything has been cleaned up.' But he pressed me, and I said, 'Well, there is this one thing. And I don't know if the insurance is going to cover it. There is a big tree stump in my front yard. They took the tree down, the tree was torched in the fire. But the stump was still there.' So Matt insisted, he said, 'We would like to bring a couple of guys and do some service at your house.'"

On that day, Fisher said he ran out to get some breakfast for the volunteers. Fisher said, "As I drove down to my house, there are four men working in the hole there, ... and one of them is running for President of the United States of America."

That man was Romney. When his son told him about the service project, he had asked if he could help.

"He had dirt under his fingernails," Fisher said. "He was the first one down the hole. He's the first one with the power saw. He's doing the hardest work of any of us."

On April 4, 1995, four of Mark and Sheryl Nixon's six children were driving back from a youth group meeting outside Boston when the driver of the minivan they were in lost control of the vehicle, which side-swiped a utility pole, struck two trees and flipped over.

The two front seat passengers - Rob and Reed Nixon, both high-school athletes - were severely injured in the wreck, their necks shattered, their bodies paralyzed. The boys underwent numerous surgeries, and the family quickly incurred hundreds of thousands of dollars of expenses, not only for the treatments but also for a special van and an addition to their house to accommodate their sons' conditions.

New to the Boston area and without the means to pay for their sons' care, the Nixons had few places to turn for help.

Enter Mitt Romney. On Christmas Eve, the Romney family showed up at the Nixon home unannounced, bearing large boxes full of gifts, including a stereo system, VCR and a generous check for Rob, Reed and the entire Nixon family.

"I knew [Romney's] schedule. I knew how busy he was. And their whole family came. He was actually teaching his boys, saying, 'This is what we do. We do this as a family,'" Mark Nixon told Michael Kranish and Scott Helman in "The Real Romney." "We've never forgotten it," Sheryl added. "It stood out so much in our minds and helped us to want to be better parents, too."

Romney later offered to pay for the boys' college education and participated in a 5K road race and fundraiser for them. In subsequent years, he also made large financial gifts to a golf tournament in their honor.

Late one summer night in 1993, distraught over his descent into alcoholism and drug use, Mr. Clark, then a 19-year-old college student, decided to confess that he had strayed from his Mormon faith. So he drove through this well-heeled Boston suburb to Mr. Romney’s secluded seven-bedroom home.

As the highest-ranking Mormon leader in Boston, Mr. Romney was responsible for determining whether Mr. Clark was spiritually fit for a mission, a rite of passage for young Mormon men. Mr. Clark had previously lied to him, insisting that he was eligible to go. But instead of condemnation that night, Mr. Clark said, Mr. Romney offered counsel that the younger man has clung to for years.

"He told me that, as human beings, our work isn't measured by taking the sum of our good deeds and the sum of our bad deeds and seeing how things even out," recalled Mr. Clark, now 37, sober and working as a filmmaker in Utah. "He said, 'The only thing you need to think about is: Are you trying to improve, are you trying to do better? And if you are, then you’re a saint.'"

Another congregant was inspired by Romney's example of service:

When Clayton Christensen, a Harvard business professor, and his wife, Christine, felt overwhelmed by church obligations, Mr. Romney showed up unexpectedly at the door. With three young children, Mr. Christensen was in charge of missionary work; his wife ran the relief society, ministering to Boston's poor.

"He said, 'I was just driving home from work, and I had a feeling that I needed to stop by and tell you that God loves you.'" Mr. Christensen was so moved, he recalled, that he wept.

In the back office of his Weston, Mass., headquarters a quarter-­century ago, Mitt Romney, the chief Mormon authority in the Boston area, told the leader of his Spanish-speaking congregation that he would not directly pay for lawyers to help the growing number of illegal immigrants in his church. Then he carefully instructed his subordinate on how to circumvent the Mormon Church's new hard line against such assistance and subsidize their legal aide.

"In those issues I cannot help you financially to pay for lawyers," Romney said, according to Jose Francisco Anleu, a Guatemalan immigrant. "But what I can do is allow you to give them food assistance from the bishop's warehouse," a church welfare pantry. The money saved could be used to "pay lawyers." He reminded Anleu that he could use church funds to cover rent, utilities and health care for his needy members. The money came from Anleu's budget, but, as Anleu noted decades later, it was a budget sustained by Romney's office.

...Marco Velasquez, an immigrant from Guatemala, said that under Romney the church held workshops to learn English and make gallons of inexpensive liquid soap. He also said that while he had papers, most of the other Latino members did not. Some came on three-month tourist visas and stayed. Many of the Central Americans, he said, simply walked across the border into Texas and made their way up to Boston.

"There is always a way to get papers - you had to pay extra," said Velasquez, who added that he had a network in East Boston that could get people Social Security cards - "but they were not real." A counselor in Cambridge before digging his shovel into the ground alongside Romney at the Boston branch's groundbreaking, he said the church "had to know, but they didn't say anything." The same, he said, went for Romney. "He probably suspected that I was doing it."

Ken Smith, the former director of the New England Center for Homeless Veterans, also came on Beck's show to discuss what Buzzfeed called "a cringe worthy moment in 1994."

During the visit to the shelter, Smith said Romney first looked at the shelter's books for about 45 minutes and then took a tour of the facility. At the end of the tour, Romney asked what Smith's biggest problem was. Smith told him the shelter had problems paying for milk, and Romney replied, "Well Ken, maybe you can teach the vets to milk cows."

The next day, Smith said, the newspapers were killing him for the remark, and Romney called Smith to apologize. The following day, the milkman showed up, offloaded his milk and gave Smith a bill that was half of its normal size. The same things happened for a month, two months, three months, and then for a full two years, Smith said. Finally, on the day the milkman was to retire, he told Smith that Romney had been paying for the milk.

"Romney's generosity has helped tens of thousands of veterans who are homeless, who have been through this facility, with nourishment," Smith said. "The milk cartons said the name of the milk company, it didn't say, 'donated by Mitt Romney.'"

(You can see video of the testimonials from Smith and some of the others here)

When the daughter of Bob Gay, a Bain colleague who once sat with Romney on the church's high council, vanished, Romney shut down his Bain offices and arranged for a search party. After she was found shaken but safe in New Jersey, Romney boarded a bus to the airport with John Hoffmire, another Bain colleague who belonged to the church. Tears welled up in Romney's eyes as he talked about his journey through New York's rave clubs showing teenagers a picture of Gay's daughter.

"I looked at this young man, and he had a bolt through his lip," Hoffmire recalled Romney telling him. "But the strongest feeling came over me, and I just thought, 'The heavenly father loved that young man just as much as he loved anybody.'"

Snopes has more, including Gay being quoted at the time - while his daughter was recovering in detox after "a massive dose of ecstasy," saying "I'm not sure we would have gotten her back without" Romney.

It's a story that's not often told. Mitt Romney at his family's summer home in Wolfeboro, N.H. on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee whisking into the night on a Jet Ski with two of his sons to rescue a drowning family of four, their two friends, and their dog.

On the weekend of July 4th, 2003, the Romney family was enjoying their picturesque summer home in New Hampshire on the shore of Lake Winnipesaukee...

"We heard a whole bunch of screaming," Josh Romney told the Boston Herald. The Romney brothers and their father quickly raced to their Jet Skis. "We tore out of there and my dad hopped on the other Jet Ski and came out right after us."

The screams came from Robert Morrissey, of New Jersey, his wife, their two adult children, two family friends, and the family dog.

The family...were sailing peacefully in their 20-foot long wooden boat until it began to take on water. Within three minutes it had begun to sink.

...'This happened really, really fast,'' Mr. Morrissey said in 2003. When the boat started to sink, he dialed 911 on his cellphone as fast as he could. ''As I'm making the call, the boat is going down under my feet.''

Romney and his sons followed the shouts to find the group floating in the darkness treading water alongside their dog.

The Governor heaved the youngest two women onto his Jet Ski, a three-seater, and raced back to shore. The two Romney sons stayed with the rest of the family until the Governor returned to ferry the rest of the family, and their dog, safely to dry land.

Click the links above, all of which have much longer accounts of these and other stories of Romney's good works.

You may choose to dislike Romney's politics, his policies, his ham-handed speeches. But what a better country we would have if half the people attacking him now could compile half of the list above. Compared to Barack Obama, who had half his house paid for by a slumlord convicted of bribing politicians, I'd rather depend on Mitt Romney if I really needed a friend when the chips were down.

2011's Arab Spring, like its predecessor in 2005, presented a sight that always elicits natural sympathy among Americans: a popular revolt against tyrannical dictators. But beneath the immediate euphoria, harder questions lurked: who would these crowds follow? Would American interests, and the interests of our democratic allies, be better served if the dictators won? The Obama Administration has never offered any kind of coherent answer to this question, and the Romney campaign does not seem eager to engage the question. In fact, the answers rest on a major fault line in conservative thought not only about foreign policy but about human nature itself.

Here's the dilemma. On the one hand, you have the venerable view, with deep roots in conservative thought, that human nature is universal and unchanging: "human nature has no history," and is the same in all nations and all epochs of history. This is customarily presented as a pessimistic view, an argument against the progressive view of history as one of unfolding enlightenment and the socialist-utopian view that governments can remake man himself. In this context, however, the permanence and universality of human nature has an optimistic character as well. Those who stress the universality of human nature argue that democracy is a universal good because people everywhere share the same basic longings for liberty, peace and security for themselves and their families, just as they also share the same basic urges to violence and oppression towards others. In this view, the virtue of democracy is that it remains the best system for providing people with the ability to promote the former while channeling the latter into lesser forms of conflict resolution. The champions of democracy thus argue that while governments may not change men, men may change governments. Moreover, this is a well-tested method of improving the lot of the individual that has more or less adapted itself to do so in many different times and cultures the world over.

The Federalist Papers, which drew on observed experience with governments around Europe and America, are full of this sort of sentiment. As James Madison famously wrote, in Federalist No. 51:

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition...It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

AMONG the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction...

There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects.

There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.

It could never be more truly said than of the first remedy, that it was worse than the disease. Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.

The second expedient is as impracticable as the first would be unwise. As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed....

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.

...It is in vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. Nor, in many cases, can such an adjustment be made at all without taking into view indirect and remote considerations, which will rarely prevail over the immediate interest which one party may find in disregarding the rights of another or the good of the whole.

Set against this view is another one with equally deep roots in conservative thinking: the primacy of culture. The story of human history is most emphatically not one in which all societies have provided equal blessings of freedom and progress to their people, and neither the structure of governments nor the variation in climates and natural resources alone can explain these variations. Rather, some cultures - especially the cultures of Western civilization and the Judeo-Christian religious tradition - have provided a superior platform on which to build stable democratic regimes, respect for individual rights and the rule of law, economic development and scientific progress. The proponents of culture argue that transplanting the fruits of Western culture and civilization into the soil of very different cultures will always be a fool's errand, or at any rate that the specific political and legal doctrines promoted by Islam (especially when combined with Arab culture) are inherently irreconcilable with democracy and other Western values.

Of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and Citizens. The mere Politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connexions with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked, Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect, that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.It is substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who, that is a sincere friend to it, can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?

[W]e have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other...

Islamic societies, of course, face no shortage of religious strictures, but the proponents of the primacy of culture stress that those strictures are different, and less congenial to the maintenance of self-government and respect for the individual. Alexis de Tocqueville, who viewed American culture, and specifically American civil society outside of government, as crucial to democracy in America, wrote:

The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live....

Muhammad brought down from heaven and put into the Koran not religious doctrines only, but political maxims, criminal and civil laws, and scientific theories. The Gospels, on the other hand, deal only with the general relations between man and God and between man and man. Beyond that, they teach nothing and do not oblige people to believe anything. That alone, among a thousand reasons, is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold its power long in ages of enlightenment and democracy...

Arguments over the dependence of democratic government on the morals and faith of the citizenry are, of course, familiar in our domestic policy debates as well. It should be no surprise that these tensions have played out in the foreign policy debates of the Bush era and its aftermath. George W. Bush was never the Wilsonian advocate of nation-building for its own sake that some of his loftier rhetoric inspired his critics to charge - our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq each started with a traditional casus belli and, as in the aftermath of World War II, turned attention to nation-building only in the aftermath of the defeat and deposition of the opposing regimes and conquest of their territory. But Bush did increasingly, over the course of his years in office, embrace the "neocon" view that replacing dictators with popular sovereignty should be a keystone of our approach to reforming the Muslim and Arab worlds in order to address the root causes of terrorism. At the risk of oversimplifying, the neocon view is more or less that that root cause is the dysfunction of Muslim and Arab societies and the need of tyrants to direct popular rage at that dysfunction outward. In this view, democratic systems of government are a safety valve that allow internal tensions to instead be channeled inward in a more productive and less violent manner.

One of the main critiques of Bush on the Right was always that he was unduly optimistic about the Muslim world and specifically whether the Muslim 'street' actually preferred regimes that promoted genocidal war against Israel and terrorism against the United States and Europe. Volumes have been written on the intractability of Islamic political doctrines and their connection to the ideology of the suicide bomber, the impossibility of peaceable coexistence with Israel, and Islam's irreconcilability with religious pluralism or any form of secular law. This critique has only accelerated without Bush at the helm. Many on the Right have given up on Afghanistan as incurably backward and treacherous (examples there and elsewhere - including last week in Libya - show Americans on the ground being betrayed by their own allies). I'm glossing here over some of the deeper debates about internal doctrinal debates within Islam as well as the role of Arab and other ethnic cultures in addition to the religious element.

In the case of North Africa, Mubarak was - as FDR would say - an SOB, but our SOB; Qaddafi had been deterred and contained effectively since surrendering his nuclear program after seeing what happened to Saddam. The regimes that replaced them are not of the most stable character, and in Egypt in particular, even President Obama has now blanched at calling the Muslim Brotherhood-run government an ally. There are substantial arguments made for the idea that winning hearts and minds is an inherently futile task.

As both a student of the Federalist Papers and a child of the Reagan era, I'm naturally optimistic about the attractiveness of the American-style system of government to the universal aspirations of all peoples, and the adaptability of such systems to improve the lives of all peoples even when imperfectly applied. The correct answer, however, likely lies in between - the fact that democracy is preferable in all places in the long run is not necessarily proof that it is the best answer in every place in the short run, not when balanced against the protection of American interests. But a vigorous national debate on the question seems, in this campaign season, a long way away.

On some foreign policy issues, the two candidates present a clear enough contrast. Romney, ever the Eisenhower-era Republican, prefers a stronger military and a more unapologetic defense of American interests and rights abroad than Obama. Obama has tended to put too much faith in his own personality cult and too much emphasis on having America wear the hair shirt, from arguing in 2007 that "I truly believe that the day I'm inaugurated, not only does the country look at itself differently, but the world looks at America differently" to his much-lauded speech to the Muslim world in Mubarak's Cairo back when he viewed Egypt as an ally. But six years after they announced their first presidential campaigns, neither candidate has really laid out a vision of how properly to balance the roles of human nature and culture in evaluating the merits of democratizing the region going forward. That will have to wait for another day.

If there is one common theme about Barack Obama's leadership style in a crisis that runs throughout his time on the national stage and is evident yet again in his response to the attacks in Cairo and Benghazi, it is passivity. Obama has shown, time and again, that he prefers to sit back, keep his distance and see what other people do first before he says or does anything. This is not an entirely bad trait - smoking out what everyone else at the table is thinking is an effective way to play poker, and there are times when doing nothing or being a follower is the wiser course. It has certainly paid him political dividends in situations where his opponents overextended themselves. But what it also clearly demonstrates is that vigorous public leadership - getting out in front and rallying the public to take some action that was not already widely supported - is above his pay grade.

When Russia rolled over Georgia, John McCain immediately established a very strong, informed position that let the world know how he'll respond as president at exactly the right time. Remember his words? Remember what John McCain said? "We are all Georgians."

Obama's -- talk about judgment. Let's look at what Obama did. Obama's first instinct was to create a moral equivalency, suggesting that both sides were equally responsible, the same moral equivalency that he's displayed in discussing the Palestinian Authority and the state of Israel.

Later -- later, after discussing this with his 300 foreign policy advisers, he changed his position, and he suggested the United Nations Security Council could find a solution.

Apparently, none of his 300 foreign policy security advisers told him that Russia has a veto power in the United Nations Security Council.

By the way, this was about three days later. So -- so he changed his position again, and he put out a statement exactly like the statement of John McCain's three days earlier.

Meanwhile, the fall of 2009 also saw the outbreak of popular protest in Iran, the unsuccessful "Green Revolution." Obama was famously slow to offer even tepid public support for the pro-democracy, anti-mullah protests, and eventually turned down a request for help from its leaders. He preferred not to get involved.

Many aspects of this book's portrait of Mr. Obama echo reports from other journalists and Washington insiders: a president who has not spent a lot of time cultivating relationships with members of Congress, Republican or Democrat, and who has similarly distant (if not downright tense) relationships with business executives; an idealistic but sometimes naive and overconfident chief executive with little managerial experience and little understanding of the horse-trading and deal-making that make Washington run (skills that, say, Lyndon B. Johnson possessed in spades).

...Another scene in this book, from early 2009, describes Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, then the House speaker, working with Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, on last-minute details of the stimulus package when the president calls. As Mr. Obama - who's been put on speakerphone - begins to deliver a high-minded message about how important the bill is, Mr. Woodward reports, Ms. Pelosi "reached over and pressed the mute button on her phone," so they could hear him but he couldn't hear them as they continued number-crunching the bill.

Then there were the negotiations with Congress over the budget crisis in July and August 2011, leading to a short-term deal and the downgrading of America's credit rating. As I detailed at the time, Obama not only refused to put his own plan on the table at any time (leaving Republicans to bid against themselves) and refused to negotiate in public (leaving the voters stuck sorting through he-said-she-said accounts of who actually was willing to do what), but even the modest deal that was eventually struck was worked out by Congressional leaders once Obama was out of the picture:

At one point, GOP officials said, the Democratic and Republican leaders asked Obama and his aides to leave the room to let them negotiate.

A tentative deal was subsequently struck, but Obama privately threatened to veto it, the sources said.

Reid has repeatedly denied that he ever signed off on such an agreement.

The following day, staffers for Boehner, Cantor, Reid and McConnell continued to work on an agreement, according to Republicans.

After more twists and turns - and involvement from Vice President Biden - a bipartisan deal was reached a week later.

Now, the embassies. Mitt Romney is taking a pounding in the press for acting quickly to put out a statement, one that was quickly overtaken by events when the State Department and unnamed White House officials distanced themselves from earlier public statements by the U.S. Embassy in Cairo. Obama now says that Romney - one of the most famously calculating and cautious people in politics - took a "shoot first, aim later" approach to the controversy by criticizing the Embassy. This is a window into Obama's thinking: he himself was silent until the next morning, and considers Romney foolish for acting swiftly and vigorously - for showing his cards first. Obama has still not taken questions on the rising violence at the embassies, and jetted off last night to campaign in Las Vegas, leaving unclear how his Administration intends to react to the rising tide of violent protest.

Caution and deliberation are not necessarily bad things; important decisions sometimes take time and require the gathering of additional information, and consensuses sometimes form better without heavy-handed leadership. Sometimes, an empty chair is all the leadership we need. Certainly, in at least some of the crises Obama has faced in the Middle East, doing more would have risked creating even bigger problems. But the next four years will present more occasions when active leadership is needed - leadership on facing down Iran, leadership on containing America's public spending, entitlement and debt crises. Barack Obama has proven, time and again, that he'd rather wait for somebody else to step up so he can decide who to follow. America deserves better.